The iPhone 5 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi, Brian Klug & Vivek Gowri on October 16, 2012 11:33 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- iPhone 5
Increased Dynamic Range: Understanding the Power Profile of Modern SoCs
Section by Anand Shimpi
The iPhone 4S greatly complicated the matter of smartphone power consumption. With the A5 SoC Apple introduced a much wider dynamic range of power consumption to the iPhone than we were previously used to. Depending on the workload, the A5 SoC could either use much more power than its predecessor or enjoy decreased overall energy usage. I began our battery life analysis last time with some graphs showing the power savings realized by a more power hungry, faster CPU.
The iPhone 5 doesn't simplify things any more. I believe the days of us having straightforward discussions about better/worse battery life are long gone. We are now firmly in the era of expanded dynamic range when it comes to smartphone power consumption. What do I mean by that? The best way to explain is to look at some data. The graphs below show total device power consumption over time for a handful of devices running the Mozilla Kraken javascript benchmark. Kraken is multithreaded and hits the CPU cores fairly well. The power profile of the benchmark ends up being very similar to loading a very js-heavy web page, although for a longer period of time. All of the device displays were calibrated to 200 nits, although obviously larger displays can consume more power.
Let's start out by just looking at the three most recent iPhone generations:
The timescale for this chart is just how long the iPhone 4 takes to complete the Kraken benchmark. The iPhone 4/4S performance gap feels a lot bigger now going back to the 4 than it did when the 4S launched, but that's how it usually seems to work. Note how tight the swings are between min and max power consumption on the iPhone 4 during the test. As a standalone device you might view the iPhone 4 as being fairly variable when it comes to power consumption but compared to the 4S and 5 it might as well be a straight line.
The 4S complicated things by consuming tangibly more power under load than the 4, but being fast enough to complete tasks in appreciably less time. In the case of this Kraken run, the 4S consumes more power than the 4, however it's able to go to sleep quicker than the 4 and thus draw less power. If we extended the timeline for the iPhone 4 significantly beyond the end of its benchmark run we'd see the 4S eventually come out ahead in battery life as it was able to race to sleep quicker. The reality is that with more performance comes increased device usage - in other words, it's highly unlikely that with a 50% gain in performance users are simply going to continue to use their smartphone the same way as they would a slower device. Usage (and thus workload) doesn't remain constant, it's somewhat related to response time.
The iPhone 5 brings new meaning to device level power consumption. With a larger display and much more powerful CPU, it can easily draw 33% more power than the 4S under load, on average. Note the big swings in power consumption during the test. The A6 SoC appears to be more aggressive in transitioning down to idle states than any previous Apple SoC, which makes sense given how much higher its peak power consumption can be. Looking at total energy consumed however, the iPhone 5 clearly has the ability to be more power efficient on battery. The 5 drops down to iPhone 4 levels of idle power consumption in roughly half the time of the iPhone 4S. Given the same workload that doesn't run indefinitely (or nearly indefinitely), the iPhone 5 will outlast the iPhone 4S on a single charge. Keep the device pegged however and it will die quicker.
Out of curiosity I wanted to toss in a couple of other devices based on NVIDIA and Qualcomm silicon to see how things change. I grabbed both versions of the HTC One X:
The Tegra 3 based One X actually performs very well in this test, but its peak power consumption is significantly worse than everything else. It makes sense given the many ARM Cortex A9 cores built on a 40nm G process running at high clock speeds on the Tegra 3.
The 28nm Snapdragon S4 (dual-core Krait) based One X gives us some very interesting results. Peak power consumption looks identical to the iPhone 5, however Apple is able to go into deeper sleep states than HTC can with its S4 platform. Performance is a little worse here but that could be a combination of SoC and software/browser. I used Chrome for all of the tests so it should be putting Android's best foot forward, but the latest update to Safari in iOS 6 really did boost javascript performance to almost untouchable levels.
At the end of the day, the power profile of the iPhone 5 appears to be very close to that of a modern Snapdragon S4 based Android smartphone. Any battery life gains that Apple sees are strictly as a result of software optimizations that lead to better performance or the ability to push aggressively to lower idle power states (or both). It shouldn't be very surprising that these sound like a lot of the same advantages Apple has when talking about Mac battery life as well. Don't let the CPU cores go to sleep and Apple behaves similarly to other device vendors, but it's really in idle time or periods of lighter usage that Apple is able to make up a lot of ground.
There's one member of the modern mobile SoC market that we haven't looked at thus far: Intel's Medfield. The data below isn't directly comparable to the data above, my measurement methods were a little different but the idea is similar - we're looking at device level power consumption over time while Kraken runs. Here I'm only focusing on the latest and greatest, the Atom based Motorola RAZR i, the Snapdragon S4 based Droid RAZR M and the iPhone 5. The RAZR i/M are nearly identical devices making this the perfect power profile comparison of Atom vs. Snapdragon S4. The RAZR i is also the first Atom Z2460 based part to turbo up to 2.0GHz.
Very interesting. Atom is the only CPU that can complete the Kraken benchmark in less time than Apple's Swift. Peak power consumption is definitely higher than both the Qualcomm and Apple devices, although Intel's philosophy is likely that the added power usage is worth it given the quicker transition to idle. Note that Atom is able to drive to a slightly lower idle level than the Snapdragon S4, although the Swift based iPhone 5 can still go lower.
At least based on this data, it looks like Intel is the closest to offering a real competitor to Apple's own platform from a power efficiency standpoint. We're a couple quarters away from seeing the next generation of mobile SoCs so anything can happen next round, but I can't stress enough that the x86 power myth has been busted at this point.
I will add that despite Intel's performance advantage here, I'm not sure it justifies the additional peak power consumption. The RAZR i ends up being faster than the iPhone 5 but it draws substantially more power in doing so, and the time savings may not necessarily offset that. We'll see what happens when we get to our battery life tests.
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Zink - Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - link
That's would be light enough to float.manders2600 - Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - link
It would be really nice to see some of these benchmarks next to an Android device running Jellybean.From my personal experience with the Galaxy Nexus, all of the benchmarks run in this article improve dramatically (many by more than 50%) with that OS version.
I'm really curious to see what a comparison between the performance of an S4 (Krait) and an A6 would be in that situation, since so much of the CPU tests are impacted by OS.
manders2600 - Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - link
But great read, though!. . . sorry, forgot to include that.
Tremendous research went into this, and it is well appreciated.
phillyry - Sunday, October 21, 2012 - link
I agree.I mean it's good that you have the devices on their native OSes but showing them on their upgraded OSes would bee good too 'cause it would add another realistic point of comparison.
cjl - Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - link
In the article, you state:"Which brings us to the next key detail with the anodization process: typically, the thickness of the anodization is half the thickness of the base aluminum. So if you had an aluminum plate that was 1mm thick, post-anodization, you would end up with a 1.5mm thick plate"
You also talk about the pore density in anodizing, and claim that apple has a pore density higher than most.
To put it quite simply, all of this is wrong.
Anodizing creates a layer that is on the order of micrometers thick. How thick the coating is depends on the details of the anodizing process, not on the thickness of the base metal. Most decorative anodized coatings are a few micrometers thick, and as you discussed, it's really not that hard to scratch them. Thicker anodizing, sometimes known as hard anodizing, is possible, and it can be done to thicknesses of 25 micrometers (0.001") or greater - from what I can find, over 100 micrometers is possible. These thicker coatings provide pretty substantial scratch resistance, and significant increases in durability, but they require substantially more process control, and it is more difficult to get a consistent coating. Note that even the thickest of these coatings is around 0.006 inches (150 micrometers) or so, which is far, far less than a 2:1 ratio on the aluminum on which it is applied. Interestingly, this thickest possible coating is about what you speculate is the thickness on the iPhone 5, but given its propensity for scratching, I sincerely doubt this to be the case.
Now for pores. The pore size on anodized aluminum is a few tens of nanometers. There is absolutely no way that you could visibly see this, or any improvement in this from one product to the next. This is 20 times smaller than the smallest wavelength of visible light. Quite simply, you can't possibly see this, and this won't be any different between Apple and any other manufacturer.
That having been said, there are some slight differences in pore structure between coatings. They won't make a significant visible difference (if any at all), but they can make a difference in durability. Specifically, hard anodized coatings (as mentioned above) tend to have thicker walled pores relative to the pore diameter. This again helps increase the wear resistance of hard anodized parts.
TL,DR: The iPhone probably has a really thin anodizing coat (<10 um). The pores are never visible on anodizing. Anodizing can be done, even on very thin aluminum, such that it would be incredibly scratch resistant.
Jaguar36 - Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - link
+1 on this.Not sure where the Vivek got the 2:1 ratio for an anodization thickness, but its nonsense. If you have a 0.25" thick part you're not going to be getting a 0.125" thick anodization. Anodization is usually less than 0.001" thick, and has no relation to the base part thickness.
Cibafsa - Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - link
Whilst Android based device manufacturers do not have to bear the majority of the SOC design/manufacture costs or the OS development costs, they do not share in the iAds/App Store type revenue Apple does.Surely it is Apple that can afford to cut prices to cost or even lower. Perhaps it is the Android manufacturers that have to worry about cheap high end phones.
Will be interesting to see what price point the iPad mini comes in at.
steven75 - Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - link
Most people following this industry are well aware by now that the App Store is run near break-even and iAds were not very successful.Calista - Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - link
A good and through review but I found it a bit too long-winded. An example would be the following example straight from the first page:'All previous iPhones have maintained the same 3.5-inch, 3:2 aspect ratio display. With the rest of the world quickly moving to much larger displays, and with 16:9 the clear aspect ratio of choice, when faced with the decision of modernizing the iPhone platform the choice was obvious.'
It could have been shortened to:
'iPhone 5 moves from the previously used 3.5", 3:2 aspect ration to a 4", 16:9 aspect ratio as common among smartphones of today. They kept roughly the same width while increasing the hight with xx mm. The resolution went from 960x640 to 1136x640."
More information is contained in the rewritten part while at the same time being shorter. Don't forget that this is Anandtech and I assume every single one of your readers are familiar with both the size and resolution of previous iPhones as well as common aspect ratios used on phones.
The same could be said about the design. I'm sure every single one of your readers have held and played with an iPhone 4/4s, and so when comparing to those two you guys could have kept a lot shorter.
phillyry - Sunday, October 21, 2012 - link
Read better as originally posted than as you rewrote it.